Here Are 25 Things You Might Not Know About The World Wide Web

Tim Berners-Lee, director
of World Wide Web Foundation, attends the annual meeting of the
World Economic Forum (WEF) in Davos January 25, 2013.REUTERS/Pascal Lauener

1). The importance of "permissionless innovation"

The thing that is most extraordinary about the internet
is the way it enables permissionless innovation. This
stems from two epoch-making design decisions made by its creators
in the early 1970s: that there would be no central ownership or
control; and that the network would not be optimized for any
particular application: all it would do is take in data-packets
from an application at one end, and do its best to deliver those
packets to their destination.

It was entirely agnostic about the contents of those packets. If
you had an idea for an application that could be realized using
data-packets (and were smart enough to write the necessary
software) then the network would do it for you with no questions
asked. This had the effect of dramatically lowering the bar for
innovation, and it resulted in an explosion of creativity.

What the designers of the internet created, in effect, was a
global machine for springing surprises. The web was the first
really big surprise and it came from an individual –Tim
Berners-Lee – who, with a small group of helpers, wrote the
necessary software and designed the protocols needed to implement
the idea. And then he launched it on the world by putting it on
the Cern internet server in 1991, without having to ask anybody's
permission.

2). The web is not the internet

Although many people (including some who should know better)
often confuse the two. Neither is Google the internet, nor
Facebook the internet. Think of the net as analogous to the
tracks and signaling of a railway system, and applications –
such as the web, Skype, file-sharing and streaming media – as
kinds of traffic which run on that infrastructure. The web is
important, but it's only one of the things that runs on the
net.

3). The importance of having a network that is
free and open

The internet was created by government and runs on open source
software. Nobody "owns" it. Yet on this "free" foundation,
colossal enterprises and fortunes have been built – a fact that
the neoliberal fanatics who run internet companies often seem
to forget. Berners-Lee could have been as rich as Croesus if he
had viewed the web as a commercial opportunity. But he didn't –
he persuaded Cern that it should be given to the world as a
free resource. So the web in its turn became, like the
internet, a platform for permissionless innovation. That's why
a Harvard undergraduate was able to launch Facebook on the back
of the web.

4). Many of the things that are built on the web
are neither free nor open

Mark Zuckerberg was able to build Facebook because the web was
free and open. But he hasn't returned the compliment: his
creation is not a platform from which young innovators can
freely spring the next set of surprises. The same holds for
most of the others who have built fortunes from exploiting the
facilities offered by the web.The only real exception is
Wikipedia.

5). Tim Berners-Lee is Gutenberg's true
heir

In 1455, with his revolution in printing, Johannes Gutenberg
single-handedly launched a transformation in mankind's
communications environment – a transformation that has shaped
human society ever since. Berners-Lee is the first individual
since then to have done anything comparable.

6). The web is not a static thing

The web we use today is quite different from the one that
appeared 25 years ago. In fact it has been evolving at a
furious pace. You can think of this evolution in geological
"eras". Web 1.0 was the read-only, static web that existed
until the late 1990s.Web
2.0is the web of blogging, Web services, mapping, mashups
and so on – the web that American commentator David Weinberger
describes as "small pieces, loosely joined". The outlines of
web 3.0 are only just beginning to appear as web applications
that can "understand" the content of web pages (the so-called
"semantic web"), the web of data (applications that can read,
analyze and mine the torrent of data that's now routinely
published on websites), and so on. And after that there will be
web 4.0 and so on ad infinitum.

7). Power lawsrule OK

In many areas of life, the law of averages applies – most
things are statistically distributed in a pattern that looks
like a bell. This pattern is called the "normal distribution".
Take human height. Most people are of average height and there
are relatively small number of very tall and very short people.
But very few – if any – online phenomena follow a normal
distribution. Instead they follow what statisticians call a
power law distribution, which is why a very small number of the
billions of websites in the world attract the overwhelming bulk
of the traffic while the long tail of other websites has very
little.

8). The web is now dominated by
corporations

Despite the fact that anybody can launch a website, the vast
majority of the top 100 websites are run by corporations. The
only real exception is Wikipedia.

9). Web dominance gives companies awesome (and
unregulated) powers

Take Google, the dominant search engine. If a Google search
doesn't find your site, then in effect you don't exist. And
this will get worse as more of the world's business moves
online. Every so often, Google tweaks its search algorithms in
order to thwart those who are trying to "game" them in what's
called search engine optimization. Every time Google rolls out
the new tweaks, however, entrepreneurs and organisations find
that their online business or service suffers or disappears
altogether. And there's no real comeback for them.

10). The web has become a memory prosthesis for
the world

Have you noticed how you no longer try to remember some things
because you know that if you need to retrieve them you can do
so just by Googling?

11). The web shows the power of
networking

The web is based on the idea of "hypertext" – documents in
which some terms are dynamically linked to other documents. But
Berners-Lee didn't invent hypertext –Ted Nelson did in 1963and there were lots of
hypertext systems in existence long before Berners-Lee started
thinking about the web. But the existing systems all worked by
interlinking documents on the same computer. The twist that
Berners-Lee added was to use the internet to link documents
that could be stored anywhere. And that was what made the
difference.

12). The web has unleashed a wave of human
creativity

Before the web, "ordinary" people could publish their ideas and
creations only if they could persuade media gatekeepers
(editors, publishers, broadcasters) to give them prominence.
But the web has given people a global publishing platform for
their writing (Blogger, Wordpress, Typepad, Tumblr),
photographs (Flickr, Picasa, Facebook), audio and video
(YouTube, Vimeo); and people have leapt at the opportunity.

13). The web should have been a read-write medium
from the beginning

Berners-Lee's original desire was for a web that would enable
people not only to publish, but also to modify, web pages, but
in the end practical considerations led to the compromise of a
read-only web. Anybody could publish, but only the authors or
owners of web pages could modify them. This led to the
evolution of the web in a particular direction and it was
probably the factor that guaranteed that corporations would in
the end become dominant.

14). The web would be much more useful if web
pages were machine-understandable

Web pages are, by definition, machine-readable. But machines
can't understand what they "read" because they can't do
semantics. So they can't easily determine whether the word
"Casablanca" refers to a city or to a movie. Berners-Lee's
proposal for the "semantic web" – ie a way of restructuring web
pages to make it easier for computers to distinguish between,
say, Casablanca the city andCasablancathe movie – is
one approach, but it would require a lot of work upfront and is
unlikely to happen on a large scale. What may be more useful
are increasingly powerful machine-learning techniques that will
make computers better at understanding context.

15). The importance of killer apps

A killer application is one that makes the adoption of a
technology a no-brainer. The spreadsheet was the killer app for
the first Apple computer. Email was the first killer app for
the Arpanet – the Internet's precursor. The web was the
internet's first killer app. Before the web – and especially
before the first graphical browser, Mosaic, appeared in 1993 –
almost nobody knew or cared about the internet (which had been
running since 1983). But after the web appeared, suddenly
people "got" it, and the rest is history.

16). WWW is linguistically unique

Well, perhaps not, but Douglas Adams claimed that it was the
only set of initials that took longer to say than the thing it
was supposed to represent.

17). The web is a startling illustration of the
power of software

Software is pure "thought stuff". You have an idea; you write
some instructions in a special language (a computer program);
and then you feed it to a machine that obeys your instructions
to the letter. It's a kind of secular magic. Berners-Lee had an
idea; he wrote the code; he put it on the net, and the network
did the rest. And in the process he changed the world.

18). The web needs a micro-payment system

In addition to being just a read-only system, the other initial
drawback of the web was that it did not have a mechanism for
rewarding people who published on it. That was because no
efficient online payment system existed for securely processing
very small transactions at large volumes. (Credit-card systems
are too expensive and clumsy for small transactions.) But the
absence of a micro-payment system led to the evolution of the
web in a dysfunctional way: companies offered "free" services
that had a hidden and undeclared cost, namely the exploitation
of the personal data of users. This led to the grossly tilted
playing field that we have today, in which online companies get
users to do most of the work while only the companies reap the
financial rewards.

19). We thought that the HTTPS protocol would make
the web secure. We were wrong

HTTP is the protocol (agreed set of conventions) that normally
regulates conversations between your web browser and a web
server. But it's insecure because anybody monitoring the
interaction can read it. HTTPS (stands for HTTP Secure) was
developed to encrypt in-transit interactions containing
sensitive data (eg your credit card details).The Snowden revelationsabout US National
Security Agency surveillance suggest that the agency may
havedeliberately weakenedthis and other
key internet protocols.

20). The web has an impact on the environment. We
just don't know how big it is

The web is largely powered by huge server farms located all
over the world that need large quantities of electricity for
computers and cooling. (Not to mention the carbon footprint and
natural resource costs of the construction of these
installations.) Nobody really knows what the overall
environmental impact of the web is, but it's definitely
non-trivial. A couple of years ago, Google claimed that its
carbon footprint was on a par withthat of Laos or the United Nations.
The company now claims that each of its users is responsible
for abouteight grams of carbon dioxide emissions
every day.Facebook claimsthat, despite its
users' more intensive engagement with the service, it has a
significantly lower carbon footprint than Google.

21). The web that we see is just the tip of an
iceberg

The web is huge – nobody knows how big it is, but what we do
know is that the part of it that is reached and indexed by
search engines is just the surface. Most of the web is buried
deep down – in dynamically generated web pages, pages that are
not linked to by other pages and sites that require logins –
which are not reached by these engines. Most experts think that
this deep (hidden) web is several orders of magnitude larger
than the2.3 billion pagesthat we can see.

22). Tim Berners-Lee's boss was the first of many
people who didn't get it initially

Berners-Lee's manager at Cern scribbled "vague but interesting"
on the first proposal Berners-Lee submitted to him. Most people
confronted with something that is totally new probably react
the same way.

23). The web has been the fastest-growing
communication medium of all time

One measure is how long a medium takes to reach the first 50
million users. It took broadcast radio 38 years and television
13 years. The web got there in four.

24). Web users are ruthless readers

The average page visit lasts less than a minute.The first 10 seconds are critical
for users' decision to stay or leave. The probability of their
leaving is very high during these seconds. They're still highly
likely to leave during the next 20 seconds. It's only after
they have stayed on a page for about 30 seconds that the
chances improve that they will finish it.

25). Is the web making us stupid?

Writers likeNick Carrare convinced that it is.
He thinks that fewer people engage in contemplative activities
because the web distracts them so much. "With the exception of
alphabets and number systems," he writes, "the net may well be
the single most powerful mind-altering technology that has ever
come into general use." But technology giveth and technology
taketh away. For every techno-pessimist like Carr, there are
thinkers like Clay Shirky, Jeff Jarvis, Yochai Benkler, Don
Tapscott and many others (including me) who think that the
benefits far outweigh the costs.

2). The web is not the internet

Although many people (including some who should know better)
often confuse the two. Neither is Google the internet, nor
Facebook the internet. Think of the net as analogous to the
tracks and signaling of a railway system, and applications –
such as the web, Skype, file-sharing and streaming media – as
kinds of traffic which run on that infrastructure. The web is
important, but it's only one of the things that runs on the
net.

3). The importance of having a network that is
free and open

The internet was created by government and runs on open source
software. Nobody "owns" it. Yet on this "free" foundation,
colossal enterprises and fortunes have been built – a fact that
the neoliberal fanatics who run internet companies often seem
to forget. Berners-Lee could have been as rich as Croesus if he
had viewed the web as a commercial opportunity. But he didn't –
he persuaded Cern that it should be given to the world as a
free resource. So the web in its turn became, like the
internet, a platform for permissionless innovation. That's why
a Harvard undergraduate was able to launch Facebook on the back
of the web.

4). Many of the things that are built on the web
are neither free nor open

Mark Zuckerberg was able to build Facebook because the web was
free and open. But he hasn't returned the compliment: his
creation is not a platform from which young innovators can
freely spring the next set of surprises. The same holds for
most of the others who have built fortunes from exploiting the
facilities offered by the web.The only real exception is
Wikipedia.

5). Tim Berners-Lee is Gutenberg's true
heir

In 1455, with his revolution in printing, Johannes Gutenberg
single-handedly launched a transformation in mankind's
communications environment – a transformation that has shaped
human society ever since. Berners-Lee is the first individual
since then to have done anything comparable.

6). The web is not a static thing

The web we use today is quite different from the one that
appeared 25 years ago. In fact it has been evolving at a
furious pace. You can think of this evolution in geological
"eras". Web 1.0 was the read-only, static web that existed
until the late 1990s.Web
2.0is the web of blogging, Web services, mapping, mashups
and so on – the web that American commentator David Weinberger
describes as "small pieces, loosely joined". The outlines of
web 3.0 are only just beginning to appear as web applications
that can "understand" the content of web pages (the so-called
"semantic web"), the web of data (applications that can read,
analyze and mine the torrent of data that's now routinely
published on websites), and so on. And after that there will be
web 4.0 and so on ad infinitum.

7). Power lawsrule OK

WEB MILESTONES

Playing with hypertext

In 1980, Tim Berners-Lee, working independently at Cern, the
European Organisation for Nuclear Research in Switzerland, builds
a computer database of people and software that uses hypertext,
around since the 60s, to link pages of information.

Searching

8). The web is now dominated by
corporations

Despite the fact that anybody can launch a website, the vast
majority of the top 100 websites are run by corporations. The
only real exception is Wikipedia.

9). Web dominance gives companies awesome (and
unregulated) powers

Take Google, the dominant search engine. If a Google search
doesn't find your site, then in effect you don't exist. And
this will get worse as more of the world's business moves
online. Every so often, Google tweaks its search algorithms in
order to thwart those who are trying to "game" them in what's
called search engine optimization. Every time Google rolls out
the new tweaks, however, entrepreneurs and organisations find
that their online business or service suffers or disappears
altogether. And there's no real comeback for them.

10). The web has become a memory prosthesis for
the world

Have you noticed how you no longer try to remember some things
because you know that if you need to retrieve them you can do
so just by Googling?

11). The web shows the power of
networking

The web is based on the idea of "hypertext" – documents in
which some terms are dynamically linked to other documents. But
Berners-Lee didn't invent hypertext –Ted Nelson did in 1963and there were lots of
hypertext systems in existence long before Berners-Lee started
thinking about the web. But the existing systems all worked by
interlinking documents on the same computer. The twist that
Berners-Lee added was to use the internet to link documents
that could be stored anywhere. And that was what made the
difference.

12). The web has unleashed a wave of human
creativity

Before the web, "ordinary" people could publish their ideas and
creations only if they could persuade media gatekeepers
(editors, publishers, broadcasters) to give them prominence.
But the web has given people a global publishing platform for
their writing (Blogger, Wordpress, Typepad, Tumblr),
photographs (Flickr, Picasa, Facebook), audio and video
(YouTube, Vimeo); and people have leapt at the opportunity.

13). The web should have been a read-write medium
from the beginning

Berners-Lee's original desire was for a web that would enable
people not only to publish, but also to modify, web pages, but
in the end practical considerations led to the compromise of a
read-only web. Anybody could publish, but only the authors or
owners of web pages could modify them. This led to the
evolution of the web in a particular direction and it was
probably the factor that guaranteed that corporations would in
the end become dominant.

14). The web would be much more useful if web
pages were machine-understandable

Web pages are, by definition, machine-readable. But machines
can't understand what they "read" because they can't do
semantics. So they can't easily determine whether the word
"Casablanca" refers to a city or to a movie. Berners-Lee's
proposal for the "semantic web" – ie a way of restructuring web
pages to make it easier for computers to distinguish between,
say, Casablanca the city andCasablancathe movie – is
one approach, but it would require a lot of work upfront and is
unlikely to happen on a large scale. What may be more useful
are increasingly powerful machine-learning techniques that will
make computers better at understanding context.

15). The importance of killer apps

A killer application is one that makes the adoption of a
technology a no-brainer. The spreadsheet was the killer app for
the first Apple computer. Email was the first killer app for
the Arpanet – the Internet's precursor. The web was the
internet's first killer app. Before the web – and especially
before the first graphical browser, Mosaic, appeared in 1993 –
almost nobody knew or cared about the internet (which had been
running since 1983). But after the web appeared, suddenly
people "got" it, and the rest is history.

16). WWW is linguistically unique

Well, perhaps not, but Douglas Adams claimed that it was the
only set of initials that took longer to say than the thing it
was supposed to represent.

17). The web is a startling illustration of the
power of software

Software is pure "thought stuff". You have an idea; you write
some instructions in a special language (a computer program);
and then you feed it to a machine that obeys your instructions
to the letter. It's a kind of secular magic. Berners-Lee had an
idea; he wrote the code; he put it on the net, and the network
did the rest. And in the process he changed the world.

18). The web needs a micro-payment system

In addition to being just a read-only system, the other initial
drawback of the web was that it did not have a mechanism for
rewarding people who published on it. That was because no
efficient online payment system existed for securely processing
very small transactions at large volumes. (Credit-card systems
are too expensive and clumsy for small transactions.) But the
absence of a micro-payment system led to the evolution of the
web in a dysfunctional way: companies offered "free" services
that had a hidden and undeclared cost, namely the exploitation
of the personal data of users. This led to the grossly tilted
playing field that we have today, in which online companies get
users to do most of the work while only the companies reap the
financial rewards.

19). We thought that the HTTPS protocol would make
the web secure. We were wrong

HTTP is the protocol (agreed set of conventions) that normally
regulates conversations between your web browser and a web
server. But it's insecure because anybody monitoring the
interaction can read it. HTTPS (stands for HTTP Secure) was
developed to encrypt in-transit interactions containing
sensitive data (eg your credit card details).The Snowden revelationsabout US National
Security Agency surveillance suggest that the agency may
havedeliberately weakenedthis and other
key internet protocols.

20). The web has an impact on the environment. We
just don't know how big it is

The web is largely powered by huge server farms located all
over the world that need large quantities of electricity for
computers and cooling. (Not to mention the carbon footprint and
natural resource costs of the construction of these
installations.) Nobody really knows what the overall
environmental impact of the web is, but it's definitely
non-trivial. A couple of years ago, Google claimed that its
carbon footprint was on a par withthat of Laos or the United Nations.
The company now claims that each of its users is responsible
for abouteight grams of carbon dioxide emissions
every day.Facebook claimsthat, despite its
users' more intensive engagement with the service, it has a
significantly lower carbon footprint than Google.

21). The web that we see is just the tip of an
iceberg

The web is huge – nobody knows how big it is, but what we do
know is that the part of it that is reached and indexed by
search engines is just the surface. Most of the web is buried
deep down – in dynamically generated web pages, pages that are
not linked to by other pages and sites that require logins –
which are not reached by these engines. Most experts think that
this deep (hidden) web is several orders of magnitude larger
than the2.3 billion pagesthat we can see.

22). Tim Berners-Lee's boss was the first of many
people who didn't get it initially

Berners-Lee's manager at Cern scribbled "vague but interesting"
on the first proposal Berners-Lee submitted to him. Most people
confronted with something that is totally new probably react
the same way.

23). The web has been the fastest-growing
communication medium of all time

One measure is how long a medium takes to reach the first 50
million users. It took broadcast radio 38 years and television
13 years. The web got there in four.

24). Web users are ruthless readers

The average page visit lasts less than a minute.The first 10 seconds are critical
for users' decision to stay or leave. The probability of their
leaving is very high during these seconds. They're still highly
likely to leave during the next 20 seconds. It's only after
they have stayed on a page for about 30 seconds that the
chances improve that they will finish it.

25). Is the web making us stupid?

Writers likeNick Carrare convinced that it is.
He thinks that fewer people engage in contemplative activities
because the web distracts them so much. "With the exception of
alphabets and number systems," he writes, "the net may well be
the single most powerful mind-altering technology that has ever
come into general use." But technology giveth and technology
taketh away. For every techno-pessimist like Carr, there are
thinkers like Clay Shirky, Jeff Jarvis, Yochai Benkler, Don
Tapscott and many others (including me) who think that the
benefits far outweigh the costs.

By 1989, Cern's internet facility is poised to allow Berners-Lee
to create the world wide web. Within a year, it is Europe's
largest internet site.

A service with a name

On 6 August 1991, Berners-Lee posts a short summary of the world
wide web project on the alt.hypertext newsgroup as his web
becomes publicly available on the internet. Fresh users gain
access after 23 August. Names such as The Information Mine had
been rejected in favour of www.

Time to browse

In December 1992, students working at the National Center for
Supercomputing Applications in Illinois begin work on Mosaic, the
early web browser. Their work with computer-generated hypertext
lists called "search engines" is popular, partly due to their
rapid response to errors and swift reaction to suggestions for
new features. In January 1993 there are 50 web servers across the
world; by October 1993 there are 500-plus.

Selling power

By 1996, publicly traded companies see a public web presence is
important. The idea of two-way communication over the web points
to the possibility of direct web-based commerce (e-commerce) and
instant business.

Boom and bust

Dotcoms multiply until their bubble pops in 2001 and investors
staunch the flow of seed cash. Some companies survive, however,
and more conventional retailers also find online merchandising is
profitable.

Shaping the world

The ease of key sites such as airline booking services, Google's
dominant search engine, eBay's auctions and Amazon.com's online
store creates a new age of commerce. Social networking flowers
too, making the WWW the home of the young.

Web 2.0

From 2002, the web increasingly opens up for public contribution
and self-publishing. Blogging has arrived.

The meaning of the future

The web stumbles on towards Berners-Lee's dream of being fully
semantic, a place where programs "become capable of analyzing all
the data on the web".